Arnaud Quercy
"The artist does not create. The artist emits. Creation happens elsewhere — in you, through you, despite you." — Manifesto Ideamorphiste
Artist. Paris.
I work under rules. Before a series begins, I institute a rule binding two domains with no natural relation, such as a musical note and a colour, and I publish it. Then I execute it by hand, to the end, without exception. The rule reports nothing I see when I hear: it is a stipulation, not a perception. What interests me is the gap between what it prescribes and what the hand realizes, which I measure and keep. I call this way of working ideamorphism.
I am colour-blind. Harmony is the register I can read where colour fails me, and that is where the rule was born.
The largest body of work is Harmonic Crossing: more than four hundred canvases moving through all twenty-four major and minor triads and many other chords. Each painting performs a voicing I write as a composer would, laid down by hand under the published rule. Alongside it, sculpture in steel and ceramic, and sand bas-reliefs I destroy myself.
Art Quam Anima, the gallery-atelier I founded in 2025 at 28 rue du Dragon in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, is where this work happens in the open: not a white cube for finished objects, but a studio where the work is still under way when you walk in. The theory behind it is published, and openly audited, by Ideamorphic Studies.
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